Best Summer Reads

As summer slowly comes to an end, it's time to relax, unwind, and focus on yourself. The best way we know how to relax is by sitting by the pool, in our favorite bikini, with a book in our hand, as we soak up the sun. Here are some of our favorite summer reads you must dive into before the summer is over.

The Girls

Emma Cline

Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

Modern Lovers

Emma StraubWhat happens to cool kids when they grow up? That is the question Emma Straub poses in this slice of post-hipster Brooklyn life. Elizabeth, Andrew, Lydia, and Zoe were the cool kids back in college in the ’90s—and they had the angsty alternative band to prove it. Now, though, Elizabeth and Andrew are married with a teen son, Harry, and Zoe is married with a teen daughter, Ruby. After buying out the other band members, Lydia rocketed to fame on one of the band’s tracks before her sudden rockstar’s death. When some Hollywood-types appear wanting the remaining band members to sign off on a movie made about Lydia’s rise and fall, old tensions resurface among the trio. As teenagers do, Harry and Ruby manage to get themselves into trouble while their parents are reliving and rehashing their own youthful dramas. Modern Lovers has its finger squarely on the pulse of Gen X’s coming of age, and Millennials attempts to make their own mark on the world.

Charcoal Joe

Walter MosleyEzekiel “Easy” Rawlins finds his life in transition. He’s ready—finally—to propose to his girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and start a life together. And he’s taken the money he got from the Rose Gold case and, together with two partners, Saul Lynx and Tinsford “Whisper” Natly, has started a new detective agency. But, inevitably, a case gets in the way: Easy’s friend Mouse introduces him to Rufus Tyler, a very old man everyone calls Charcoal Joe. Joe’s friend’s son, Seymour (young, bright, top of his class in physics at Stanford), has been arrested and charged with the murder of a white man from Redondo Beach. Joe tells Easy he will pay and pay well to see this young man exonerated, but seeing as how Seymour literally was found standing over the man’s dead body at his cabin home, and considering the racially charged motives seemingly behind the murder, that might prove to be a tall order.

Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes

Elizabeth BardThis charming follow-up to the authoer's bestsellng Lunch in Paris takes us through the next period n Elizabe's life, when she moves with her family from Paris to a small town in the South of France. Each chapter weaves her take on rural living and new motherhood with recpies to bring tastes of Provence off the page and onto your table.

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul KalanithiAt the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.